Commentary: Can the world agree upon a 'common memory' of the Holocaust?

by Mona Sue Weissmark, Chicago TribuneFeb 16, 20184 minutes

My mother and father were survivors of Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald.

All that remained of our family tree were a few yellowed photographs tucked away in a drawer.

I can't pinpoint exactly when I first learned that, aside from my parents, every close family member was murdered by the Nazis.

No one ever sat me down and told me such things had happened.

I was aware we had no living relatives. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - these were abstract concepts. Indeed, I remember I would try to figure out, for example, what a cousin was by doing some hypothetical problem-solving. "So if my mother's